James Baldwin and Bessie Smith: Ethical Rhythm

James Baldwin’s affinity for jazz and blues has been well-documented. It is a commonplace to say that the music of singers like Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith had a powerful influence on his writing, but the specifics of this influence remain to be worked out. How, we might ask, do the performative dimensions of the blues insinuate themselves into literary form, in general, and into Baldwin’s writing, in particular? My presentation attempts to answer this question by looking closely at Baldwin’s relationship to the blues singer Bessie Smith. My argument is that in both Baldwin’s prose and Smith’s singing, we find a configuration of aesthetic form with sharp ethical dimensions. The sinuous rhythms of Baldwin’s writing work, I argue, to cultivate an ethics of antiphony derived from the blues, one that speaks directly to contemporary configurations of race and sexuality.

Bruce Barnhart (ILOS, UiO) is Associate Professor of American literature and co-director (with Tina Skouen) of the project Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. He is also co-director (with Marit Grøtta) of the Temporal Experiments research group. His research interests are wide-ranging, including African American literature, 20th century American literature, critical theory, and the connections between music and literature. His research consistently interrogates the role that temporality plays in cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic formations. His work draws on methodologies derived from Critical Race Studies, the Frankfurt school, and postructuralism in order to interrogate and critique the centrality of race as a formative principle in American literature and culture. Barnhart’s engagement with the question of rights comes primarily from his interest in the connection(s) between property rights and racialized notions of personhood. In his book, Jazz and the Time of the Novel, he investigates the connections between the temporality of different aesthetic forms and the dependence of traditional forms of property rights on the temporality of expectation and exclusion. He continues to pursue his investigation of different literary and musical practices as both critiques of existing forms of temporality, personhood, and rights, and as models of alternative social and intellectual forms.

Barnhart has published work on the Harlem Renaissance, the temporality of the novel, jazz, and the early civil rights figure James Weldon Johnson. He is currently at work on a book entitled Trading on Racial Futures, an examination of the ways in which American novels and economic practices construct different versions of a usable future. The book focuses on the temporality of racial and cultural politics, and on the ways in which the logic of financialization creates proprietary rights in future holdings that stand in the way of more substantive conceptions of civil and economic rights.